Karl Malden: the ugly mug who couldn’t help dazzling audiences

Karl Malden, who died last week, was never a household name - but he was one
of the most brilliant supporting actors Hollywood has seen.

Subtly superb: Karl Malden

By Philip Horne

10:52AM BST 10 Jul 2009

When Karl Malden died last week, at the age of 97, I was shocked – not least because I hadn’t known he was still alive. He was already middle-aged in Elia Kazan’s wonderful A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), where, at 39, he won an Oscar for his role as Blanche DuBois’s awkward, idealising suitor Mitch. His friend Marlon Brando, 12 years his junior, died a while ago, as had all the other leading figures in the film.

Though a familiar, much-loved face and character, Malden was never fully a household name. Younger moviegoers these days may well have no idea who he was – or know him only as the older cop with young Michael Douglas in the much loved television cop show The Streets of San Francisco (1972-77).

He was, though, a crucial figure in dozens of good films during the maturity of the classical Hollywood cinema between 1945 and, say, 1968 – and honoured as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for five years from 1989. Brando chose him as co-star in the one (terrific) film he directed, the western One-Eyed Jacks (1961). He was one of the great survivors of the Actors Studio era – the laboratory which pioneered the Method, better known in its starrier incarnations like Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Paul Newman – not to mention Warren Beatty and Robert De Niro.

But Karl Malden was no glamour boy like those others, as one look at his unforgettably ugly, expressive mug with its magnificently bulbous nose, his thickset build or his undisguised bald patch confirms. In an industry increasingly obsessed with looking good, he represented authenticity – and with reason. Chicago-born Mladen George Sekulovich had spent three years in Depression-era steel factories before making the leap to acting. In On the Waterfront, Kazan recalled, “I wanted the priest Malden played to be a rigidly ethical man who in any circumstance would always tell you what is right. I knew Malden as well as I knew anybody, and he had that quality.”

It’s crucial to the movement of the film: his plea to the terrorised dockworkers to resist the Mafia domination of their industry has to convert Brando’s Terry Malloy to martyrdom. Supporting actors of Malden’s calibre often “support” a whole movie.

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Malden was able to turn his Method focus on interiority and ambivalence – the physical mapping-out of thought – to a startling range of characters; intelligent, cunning, blinded, always full of human weakness, open to feelings of low rage or remorse or suspicion, as well as nobility. Kazan used him as the sweaty, lustful, bullying, baffled, mean-minded mill-owner and seeming cuckold Archie Lee Meighan in the delightfully dark Tennessee Williams-scripted sex comedy Baby Doll (1956) – and raved: “I think the way Karl Malden plays Archie Lee is darling. His foolishness is so attractive to me. He’s so human.”

Malden also worked with Hitchcock on I Confess (1953), playing the clever detective inspector who (wrongly) suspects Montgomery Clift’s anguished priest. His ordinariness really grounds the story: his gift for making thought physical is quietly dazzling. When Clift unexpectedly refuses to give his alibi, Malden’s successive small reactions are a masterclass in the subtleties of acting. Malden, surprised, sits forward at his desk, his eyes gleam and widen, he stops writing, grips his pen with both hands, looks down at it, opens his mouth as if to speak, puts the pen down, then starts – “Father…” It catches the man’s ambivalence: sympathy, suspicion and ferocity jostling for domination.

Kazan is right, “human” is the word. Malden was great at thinking visibly, coming to realise things. Even his performance as the minister in Disney’s startlingly rich and dark Pollyanna (1960), converted by the young heroine from fire and brimstone sermonising to loving humanity, brilliantly balances severity, comedy and seriously touching emotion. The treacherous “Dad” Longworth in One-Eyed Jacks is monstrous, but Malden slips between shifty affability and murderous ferocity with glorious believability. The characters he played weren’t always morally impeccable – were often slippery or sleazy – but Karl Malden’s acting always conveys a moral vision, sometimes an uncomfortable one. I will miss him – but the films remain, and he is a treasure to be cherished.